Get ideas to improve your account

Get more out of AdWords with the Opportunities tab — an entire section dedicated to helping you improve your campaigns.

Think of the tab as a personal assistant who customizes opportunities for your account. It can help you discover new keywords, improve your bids and budgets, and more.

Whether you created your account a few days ago or have been managing it for longer, you should try the tab.

Read on to learn more about each opportunity, tips for evaluating your opportunities, how the changes you apply go into effect, and why you might not see opportunities.

Opportunities related to keywords

Keyword opportunities can help you better reach potential customers by showing your ads to people who are most likely interested in what you offer. You might see the following opportunities related to keywords.

You might see new keyword opportunities that are similar to other keywords already in your account. For each of these opportunities, you might also see how many impressions or clicks you might get each week if you were to add the new keywords to your account. These keyword opportunities can help you reach potential customers who are interested in your products or services, but might not be seeing your ads.

For a more detailed view of your keyword opportunities, click View opportunities. You'll see all of your keyword opportunities organized into ad groups that you can apply directly to your account. Or, you can click the View button to edit your new keyword opportunities. For example, you can add new keyword opportunities to a different ad group, change the bid, or deselect keywords that you don't want to add to your account.

Click View opportunities to see all of your new keyword opportunities.

You can review your opportunities, and then immediately apply them to your account or edit them.

Apply to account: Click Add all to account to add your opportunities in bulk or click Add to add each opportunity separately.

Edit: Click the View button or the "View" link next to the keywords. You can change the ad group that the new keyword opportunities will be added to, change the ad group default bid, and choose which keyword opportunities you'd like to add to your account.

If you’re not using negative keywords, you might see an opportunity to add some. Negative keywords prevent your ad from showing to people searching for certain words or phrases that aren’t relevant to what you offer. They can help you focus on your most interested customers, reduce your costs, and increase your return on investment.

Not sure which negative keywords to add? You can use the guided tour in the negative keywords opportunity to learn how to add them using the Search terms report. This report shows the exact words people searched for when they saw and clicked your ad. You can use the Search terms report to find terms that aren’t relevant to what you offer and add those as negative keywords. Just click Guide me to take a guided tour that walks you through each step in your account to add negative keywords.

If you're missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing, high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types. You might also see how many impressions or clicks you might get each week if you were to apply these keywords to your account.

Broader match types will be the phrase or broad match versions of your existing keywords. For example, if your account contains high-quality exact match keywords, then we might show you phrase match versions of these keywords. Or, if your account contains high-quality phrase match keywords, then we might show you broad match versions of these keywords. By using phrase or broad match versions of your existing keywords, you can show your ads to more potential customers.

Opportunities related to bids and budgets

Bid and budget opportunities can help you get more traffic (like clicks or impressions), improve your Ad Rank, or improve your performance. You might see the following opportunities related to bids and budgets.

You might see opportunities to match the estimated top of page bids for your high-quality keywords. You might also see how many additional clicks or the increased clickthrough rate (CTR) that you might get each week if you were to raise the bids for these keywords.

Estimated top of page bids are the approximate cost-per-click (CPC) bids needed for your ads to show regularly in the top positions above Google search results. By matching your estimated top of page bids, your ads can appear where potential customers are more likely to click — above search results.

You might see opportunities to match the estimated first page bids for your high-quality keywords. You might also see how many impressions your ads might have lost in a week because your keywords' CPC bids are too low.

Estimated first page bids are the approximate cost-per-click (CPC) bids needed for your ads to show on the first page of Google search results when a search term exactly matches your keyword. By matching your estimated first page bids, your ads can appear where potential customers are more likely to click — on the first page of search results.

You might see opportunities to lower the bids for campaigns that are limited by budget by a certain percentage. You might also see how many additional clicks you might get each week if you were to lower your bids.

By lowering your bids, you can decrease your average cost-per-click (avg. CPC), which is the average amount you’re charged for a click. For campaigns that are limited by budget, a lower cost-per-click will help you get more clicks for the same budget.

You might see opportunities to raise the bids for keywords that are triggering your ads and the ads of other advertisers who are competing for the same traffic. You might also see the number of keywords for which your ads could show more often than these other advertisers (they'll be identified by their website URLs).

By raising your keyword bids, your ads can show more often than other advertisers' ads that are competing for the same traffic. You can measure the effect by looking at your impression share, which is the number of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. The impression share data that's used to determine these other advertisers comes from the Auction insights report.

If you're using Conversion Tracking, you might see opportunities to set campaign-level location bid adjustments. We'll show you bid adjustment opportunities if clicks from people in these locations are more or less likely to lead to conversions based on your account's conversion history. You might also see how many additional conversions you might get or how much you might save each week if you were to set these location bid adjustments.

Location bid adjustments let you bid more or less competitively for searches from people in different locations. By setting location bid adjustments, you can focus on areas where you're getting more business.

You might see opportunities to raise the daily budgets for campaigns that are limited by budget. You might also see how many clicks you might be losing out on each week if you were to raise your campaigns' daily budgets.

If your campaigns are limited by budget, it means your ads aren't showing as often as they could and that your budget is lower than the recommended daily budget. When your budget is below the recommended amount, it means that our system predicts that your budget cannot accommodate all of the traffic available for your keywords. Raising your daily budgets can help make sure you don't lose out on potential customers.

Opportunities related to ad extensions

Ad extension opportunities can help you improve your ad performance or reach your advertising goals, like getting phone calls directly from your ad. You might see the following opportunities related to ad extensions.

You might see opportunities to add sitelink extensions to ads in campaigns that are getting enough traffic and would have would have been likely to show sitelinks. You might also how many additional clicks or the increased clickthrough rate (CTR) you might get each week if you were to add sitelinks to your ads.

Sitelink extensions give your potential customers a shortcut to product, promotion, or any other webpage you want. They can also help make your ad more prominent.

You might see opportunities to add call extensions to ads in campaigns that are getting enough mobile traffic and would have would have been likely to show call extensions. You might also see the increased clickthrough rate (CTR) or increased number of calls you might get each week if you were to add call extensions to your ads.

Call extensions give your potential customers a way to call you instantly on their mobile devices with a clickable "Call" button on your ads.

Opportunities related to account structure

The account structure opportunity can help you improve your account's performance. You might see the opportunity to create new ad groups from existing keywords.

You might see opportunities to create new ad groups with keywords that are in your existing ad groups. These existing keywords will be grouped by themes, like the products or services that you offer.

By creating new ad groups with similar keywords, you can then create ads that are relevant to the theme of these keywords — helping to improve the performance of your ad groups. That's because when people search for your products or services, they'll be more likely to click on an ad that's relevant to what they're looking for. For example, people searching for the phrase men's running shoes are more likely to click an ad about running shoes instead of one that's about shoes in general.

To edit a new ad group, including the ad group name, keywords, or ads, click View. Once you create your new ad groups and add them to your account, note that your existing keywords will be paused and remain in the original ad group. This means that your existing keywords aren't removed from the ad group they're currently in.

Opportunities related to settings

These opportunities can help you show your best ads and get more clicks or conversions by optimizing your ad rotation settings. You can also increase your reach and traffic by showing your ads on Google search partner sites. You might see the following opportunities related to your settings.

You might see more clicks and a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) when you change your setting to “Optimize for clicks.” When you choose this setting, Google tries to show your ads that are expected to get the most clicks, based on your past clickthrough rates.

You might see more conversions by changing your setting to “Optimize for conversions.” When you choose this setting, Google tries to show your ads that are expected to get the most conversions (like purchases and sign-ups).

If you haven’t done so yet or recently, you might see an opportunity to target Google search partners, like aol.com, to get more clicks at a lower cost. You’ll see how many more clicks you might get each week. Keep in mind that clickthrough rates on search partners don’t affect quality scores on Google.

Tips for evaluating, sorting, filtering, and dismissing opportunities

Before you apply your keyword opportunities, think about whether the potential impressions or clicks you could get and the additional investment meet your advertising goals. Keep in mind that there's more to keywords than volume — what's critical is their relevance to what you're advertising, like your products or services.

Remember that these are automatically generated opportunities, so please review them carefully. If an opportunity doesn't seem relevant to your ad campaign or appropriate for your advertising goals, we recommend that you don't apply that opportunity.

Sort: To help you easily evaluate your opportunities, you can sort them by different criteria depending on the type of opportunity. For example, you can sort your new keyword opportunities by relevance, change in clicks or impressions, or campaign name. To do so, click the "Sort by" drop-down menu and select the criteria that you'd like to sort your opportunity by.

Filter: To more effectively manage your opportunities, you can filter them by different criteria depending on the opportunity type. For example, you can filter your new keyword opportunities by campaign to only see opportunities that are related to a certain campaign.

After you click the View opportunities button, you'll see a list of all your opportunities. At the top of this list, there are two buttons that you can click to either view your opportunities in this list view or in a table view. Depending on how you like to view your opportunities and related data, you might find it useful to evaluate your opportunities data in a table.

Once you’ve clicked the View opportunities button, if you see any opportunities you’re not interested in applying, you can dismiss them by clicking the X in the corner. When you dismiss an opportunity, we won’t show it to you for a certain period of time.

How the changes you apply go into effect

Once you apply an opportunity or multiple opportunities to your account by clicking the Add button or Add all to account button, the changes usually go into effect immediately. The next time you review your campaigns, you'll see that they've been updated to reflect the changes that you applied.

The one exception is with some keyword opportunities. All keywords have to comply with the AdWords policies, so some new or edited keywords may need to await review and approval before they are eligible to trigger your ad.

There isn't an automatic "undo" function. Once you decide to apply the proposed opportunities, there's no way to automatically revert back to your previous campaign. However, you can make changes manually to your campaign at any time.

All of the approved changes that are applied to your campaign will be shown in your account's My Change History. This can help you determine what has changed in your campaign.

We recommend running the campaign with your changes for at least two weeks in order to see the impact of the changes on your campaign performance. This ensures that your ad groups accrue enough performance history to contribute to your keywords' Quality Score, position, and conversion rate. We also recommend that you track the results of your changes using the performance reports in your Campaigns tab or one of our free reporting tools, such as Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics.

Why you might not see opportunities

We won't necessarily have opportunities for every campaign at all times - there are a variety of reasons why you might not see opportunities.